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Cory Doctorow

Because while it's hard to tell if *recommendations* are fair or not, it's very easy to tell whether blocking end-to-end is unfair. When a person asks for another person to send them messages, and a third party intervenes to block those messages, that is censorship. Even if you call it "freedom of reach," it's still censorship.

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14 comments
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

For creators, interfering with E2E is also wage-theft. If you're making stuff for Youtube or Tiktok or another platform and that platform's algorithm decides you've broken a rule and therefore your subscribers won't see your video, that means you don't get paid.

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

It's as if your boss handed you a paycheck with only half your pay in it, and when you asked what happened to the other half, your boss said, "You broke some rules so I docked your pay, but I won't tell you which rules because if I did, you might figure out how to break them without my noticing."

Content moderation is the only part of information security where #SecurityThroughObscurity is considered good practice:

doctorow.medium.com/como-is-in

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That's why content moderation algorithms are a #labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/trac

We're at the tail end of a ghastly, 15-year experiment in neo-Bellheadism, with the big platforms treating end-to-end as a relic of a simpler time, rather than as "an elegant weapon from a more civilized age."

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That's why content moderation algorithms are a #labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/trac

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The post-Twitter platforms like #Mastodon and #Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see.

pluralistic.net/2022/08/08/loc

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-a

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that *require* firms to break E2E *and* block third-party de-enshittification tools:

openrightsgroup.org/blog/onlin

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This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-a

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses:

* Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even *get* a feed of things you asked to see;

* Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether *solicited* messages reach their readers;

* Focusing on algorithmic transparency rather, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms;

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

* Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties;

* Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair:

doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-ce

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The wholly artificial distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of reach" is just more self-serving nonsense and the only reason we're talking about it is that a billionaire dilettante would like to create chokepoints so he can extract payola from his users and meet his debt obligations to the Saudi royal family.

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like "freedom" and "discrimination" and "free speech." Remember: these definitions have *nothing* to do with how the world's 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b

William Shaw Antliff (modified)
macleans.ca/history/this-canad

Public domain
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrigh

eof/

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like "freedom" and "discrimination" and "free speech." Remember: these definitions have *nothing* to do with how the world's 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

--

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

javitel replied to Cory

@pluralistic is there a tool for this app that puts together a thread that you can then share outside the app? Sort of like threadreaderapp.com did for the bird site?

Cory Doctorow replied to javitel

@javitel they're all collected at pluralistic.net

Amandine Bourg replied to Cory

@pluralistic thank you so much for this thread.

JohnW replied to Cory

@pluralistic

Incredible thread Cory!

Birdshite vs. Mastodon is a good microcosm of it.

I'm watching this information war unfold with a lot of apprehension.

Unfettered, unaltered online conversation has the worlds biggest target on its back right now.

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